Getting Leaner, Fitter and Better for Business – Hello 2014!

Date: January 6, 2014

Author: Andrea

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Happy New Year Everyone….and no, this isn’t a blog about joining or going to the Gym!

The Christmas and New Year Break is often one of the best for us at urbanbubble as whilst we still have a job to do (we are 24/7, 365 profession), many residents vacate for the holidays and the City is generally quiet. This means when taking time off, we can properly switch off, emails, calls, social media…the whole lot! We hope you all had a good break too and raring to go with a new year.

Our main and in some ways, only focus this year at urbanbubble is to invest, improve and perfect our processes and service. We’re investing in a new integrated Property Management system which will transform our business, our service and each of our roles here at urbanbubble. The investment will eradicate the tasks and work which add no value or are laborious, allowing each of us to spend more time at the Property and serving our customers and residents.

This isn’t just corporate waffle – to give an example, when a lift breaks down, we may receive a dozen calls on a large site notifying the office of the failure. Our redesigned service, supported by the new system will allow a text to be automatically sent to each owner/resident as soon as a major failure is reported with the job being opened on the system, giving all the info you’d expect. Once its repaired and back up and running, the system will send the update to all letting you know, once the job is closed on the system. Currently, to produce our quarterly Financial Reports to the RMC Board or Landlord, it takes about 2 to 3 hours to compile. The new system will be configured to provide this by the press of a button and a few minutes of checking.

Before we bring any new system in, we have a period of Process Mapping and Requirements gathering to complete. We’ve over 100 processes split between 7 different process families and during January and February, these are being reviewed/updated and from this, we’re defining what our future state / service should be in a perfect world. We will select the system/provider that most closely fits and during March, get the system ready so all Financial processes can be ran by 1st April 2014.

We’ll be spending April-June, training the Property Teams on the new system, redefining our processes to make them leaner, more efficient and better engaged with the customer/resident ready to launch fully into urbanbubble by 1st July. The whole project is being led by Andrea Thornhill, our Change and Innovation Manager but requires huge support from every colleague as we hold workshops, review documents, meet with the system experts and get trained on the whichever bit of kit we choose. You may spot us in the ‘Think Tank’ on the ground floor of our Tib/Swan Street Office drawing process maps on the glass walls, inspired by Google (well….actually, The Interns film based on the Google campus!). In the short term, you may find lines being closed over lunch or opened/closed slightly late/early respectively as we fit in these sessions. However, we are doing the bulk of the work outside of core hours, using overtime and bringing in additional resource to help.

Long term, we’re working on something very special which will make our service all the stronger and more focused, giving you a truly unique and market leading agent. If you have any questions at all on this or any aspect of our service, you can always contact me on MD@urbanbubble.co.uk or call my direct dial which is 0161 236 3336.